


How You Saved My Life

by luninosity



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Character Death Fix, Declarations Of Love, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fake Character Death, Happy Ending, Loneliness, M/M, Post-Movie(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:06:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-movie fic in which Clint attempts to deal with all the emotional aftermath of his trauma, and then discovers that Phil is alive, because that is obviously a True Thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How You Saved My Life

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Oasis’s “Talk Tonight”: "all your dreams are made/ of strawberry lemonade/ and you make sure I eat today/ I wanna talk tonight/ ’bout how you saved my life…"

The rest of the Avengers have someplace to go. He doesn’t.

Clint watches them all leave, one by one, bruised and battered and triumphant. Steve Rogers looks excited, maybe for the first time, about discovering the world he’s been newly awakened to protect. Bruce Banner leaves with Tony Stark, which everyone’s expecting anyway, though Clint does wonder briefly what Pepper Potts will think of this when the two of them show up. Thor and his brother (his twisted, seductive, eloquent brother) vanish into thin air, or in theory Asgard. Clint finds himself staring at that empty space, for a while. He knows what emptiness feels like, inside.

Natasha puts a hand on his shoulder and he doesn’t automatically spin into a defensive posture because he knows it’s her. She asks whether he’s all right, if he’s coming back to base, and he nods and says yes, because he is, and it’s true enough.

She looks at him, head tipped to the side. Says, “It’s not your fault,” and he doesn’t know what she thinks she means, which one out of the innumerable dominos that’ve fallen might conceivably not have been pushed by him.

He says, “I know,” because that’s easy, and she sighs. “See you back there?”

“Yes.”

He watches her go, too. SHIELD is home for her. The home she’d never had, before. The home it’d once been for him, before Loki, before the Chitauri, before everything. Before Phil, Agent Coulson, had died in the heart of the helicarrier and left that emptiness that’s worse than anything the Frost-Giant’s son could ever have done to him.

He’ll go back because he has nowhere else to go, not now. But they won’t trust him. Half of the agents look at him with suspicion already, wondering how deeply Loki’s machinations have screwed up his brain.

He wonders that too, but then he wonders a lot of things. Like whether he should’ve kissed Phil, after all, any one of the times they’d stood a little too close, touched in a hallway, argued over orders. Whether he could’ve slid down from his perch on a overhead beam and surprised the agent who was never surprised, and startled all that brisk competence into heat with his lips.

Phil might not’ve been surprised, even then. Phil never is. Was. _Was_.

He’d always thought that they’d have time, time to go on bickering over whether _stay put until I say_ actually meant precisely that or something more like _until you think I’m about to say_ , which had been Clint’s interpretation, and had saved three lives in Sao Paulo and cost about two pints of Clint’s own blood.

Phil had shouted at him for ten minutes for that, and then reached over and held his hand, not looking at him, calmly reporting in to the director, as the helicopter’d whisked them off to the infirmary, and Clint’d lain there bleeding and dust-covered and grinning, foolishly wide, at the tightness of those fingers around his own.

He’d thought they’d have time. He should have kissed Phil then. Should have done so many things.

A swirl of leaves billows through the empty space where Loki’s vanished, minutes before. And Clint looks away, and lets himself be blown back into motion by the breeze.

He can’t sleep, either. He’s never slept much, of course, staying alert, evaluating, ready for the next possible target. But this is different. When he closes his eyes he sees himself holding arrows, aimed at Loki’s heart, and he can’t loose them, can’t make his fingers obey his commands, and Loki laughs, and stabs a spear through Phil’s body all over again.

He takes to spending his nights wandering the helicarrier, which really isn’t that unusual for him, but it’s purposeless wandering, not reconnaissance, and that is.

He finds the highest possible spaces, vantage points from which to look down on the world. It’s so distant. So far away. Not connected to him. He knows he’s helped save it, but he’s also helped betray it. And Phil is still dead.

It might be a week, or a month, and he’s barely slept, and he knows he’s lost weight, and Natasha tells him he looks like hell and he spends two hours sparring with her and it helps, briefly, but the instant the adrenaline wears off, the dullness creeps back in.

He’s sitting, one leg dangling idly over a metal edge, in the night’s newest hiding place, which happens to be the maintenance crawlspace over the infirmary, and looking at the stars. He can see Orion, and Clint knows nothing about mythology or astrology, but he’s pretty sure that the hunter’s mocking his despair.

He swings his leg, taps his heel against the glass window below. He doesn’t usually, preferring economy of motion, but tonight he’s restless. Anyway, no one’s going to see him. No one in the infirmary. All either patched up, or fully recovered, or dead.

Dead. He looks out at the night again. It’s a very simple word. Four letters. Easy to spell. To say. To think, inside his head.

He idly calculates the speed at which an arrow’d plummet to earth, given the current altitude and windspeed and rotation. Huh. That fast.

“What the hell,” says a shocking, familiar, beloved voice, “are you doing?”

Clint spins around, slips, nearly falls, which, what a ridiculous way to go _that_ would be, ungraceful and accidental to boot.

And the hand that wraps around his wrist and yanks him to his feet is the same hand that’s held his when he’s been bleeding, and it’s warm, and it’s alive, and it’s Phil.

“What,” he says, “what—you—but I didn’t even—did I jump without _noticing_?”

“You idiot,” Phil says, affectionately, angrily, “no, you didn’t, and again, why the hell are you up here thinking those thoughts?”

“Well,” Clint points out, logically, feeling as though he’s explaining himself in a dream, irrationally rational as only nighttime visitations can be, “you’re dead.”

“I am not. Does this feel dead to you?” The tug on his wrist, which at any other time would’ve merited a sudden flip of the attacker over Clint’s shoulder, is decided, and forceful, and Clint goes willingly, ending up inches away from him, so close he could reach out and touch, so he does.

Arm. Shoulder. Face, fingers brushing along Phil’s cheek, caresses he never would’ve dared try when Phil was alive, too tender, too awestruck and raw to be revealed.

“Barton,” Phil says, and his voice shakes. “Clint. Please. Look at me.”

“I am…you’re a very convincing hallucination. You feel like…” Like everything he’s ever wanted. Like everything he’s lost, offered up to him one last time, mockingly. He stops touching. Closes his hand.

Phil swears, abruptly, viciously, words biting into the night. “I might have to punch Nick Fury in the good eye for this. Just so you know. This is me contemplating treason. For you.”

“He told us you were dead. He showed us—he said you were. Gone.”

“And you don’t think he’d lie to you if he thought it would serve a purpose?”

Clint opens his mouth. Stops, words fading away. Of course the answer’s yes. Of course it’d worked. Of course Fury’d known it would.

“You _aren’t_ dead.” He wants to be angry, about the lie, about the manipulation, even as he understands the reasons. And he will be. Later. There’s no room for anger now.

“Technically I was, for about a minute.” Phil reaches for him, this time. Puts both hands on his shoulders. “If we’re being accurate.”

“You like accuracy…”

“Yes, I do. Precision. Efficiency. Why do you think I like you?”

Clint blinks. Phil’s still there. And those words’re still hanging in the air. “But I don’t listen to you. And then you yell at me. I was thinking about Sao Paulo.”

“So was I. You think I enjoy seeing you bleed? I don’t want to see you bleed, Barton. I don’t want you to—I want you here. With me. Neither of us being dead. Understand?”

“No. But that’s okay. How did you know—”

“I could see you. From the infirmary. You weren’t—you never—I could _see_ you. So I snuck out.”

“You did.”

“Breaking all the rules for you, tonight. Appreciate it.”

“I do,” Clint says, because he’s starting to believe it, now, Phil here and alive and being sarcastic and talking to him. “You—I think I like you breaking rules. For me.”

“Do you?” Phil starts to smile. It’s not a smile Clint’s seen before, hopeful, hesitant, curious, excited. He finds himself smiling back. “Here’s another one, then. No vigorous activity. For at least another month.”

“No—”

“I’m breaking that one, too,” Phil says, and kisses him.

Phil kisses like he’s trying to save them both, trying to pull them back onto stable ground, away from the distance and the edges of the world, as if with enough openness and passion and certainty he can hold them together always.

He can. Clint shuts his eyes and lets himself be saved.

“I love you,” he says, into the kiss, and Phil says, “I know, I love you too, and I heard about you jumping off buildings into nests of Chitauri, by the way, is that what happens to you without me, when are you going to be responsible, think of the paperwork,” and Clint says, instead of crying, “You _like_ the paperwork,” and “don’t leave me,” and “please.”

“Of course not.” Phil kisses him again, in the dim secret space of the helicarrier, under the stars, the space that all at once feels like it might be safe again. “Only because you said please. I’ve never heard you use that word before. Didn’t know you knew it.”

“I know a lot of words. Big ones, even. Intellectual.” He runs a hand over Phil’s chest. Notices something, beneath the loose SHIELD-issue off-duty shirt. “Bandages?”

“That’s definitely a word, but I’m not sure it counts as intellectual. For a while longer, yeah.”

“Should you be in bed?”

“Don’t tell me you’re worried. It’s my job to worry about you.”

“I didn’t tell you. What makes you think I am?”

“I am a highly trained SHIELD agent, Barton, I know these things.”

“So am I, and you didn’t answer my question.”

“True. Um…Siberia.”

“…one bed and holding each other to stay warm?”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, “Clint says. Restlessness into serenity. Emptiness filling up, at last, brighter than the stars beyond. The perfect shot, the surety of arrows in flight, straight and true. The joy of knowing, beyond any doubt, that they’ll unerringly find home. “Please.”


End file.
